Switching from Desk to Freshdesk: How to Get Ready

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages - Henry Ford

First-class customer service is that one thing on which the whole business depends. Business owners of both small companies and large enterprises pay attention to customer experience and for that reason often use a help desk to provide top-notch service.

A reliable help desk that facilitates outstanding customer support and employee productivity is essential. However, when the product you use goes out of business, there’s no other choice than to plan your move to a new platform. In this article, we will cover the essential steps you should take to prepare for and run a smooth Desk to Freshdesk migration. Let's dive in!

How do you approach Desk to Freshdesk migration?

When the decision is made, there is one question that rises: “How does one do a data migration?”

In fact, there are many more questions that arise when companies decide to change their help desk software. Who should be responsible for the project? Which records should be included? What’s the best way to transfer the tickets? The list goes on and on.

While we can’t answer all the questions for you, we can surely help with the trickiest parts of this process.

Covering all the bases

Just like in baseball, you need to advance three bases before you can start using your new shiny Freshdesk. First, jot down the steps you need to take. Second, prepare your Desk.com records. And lastly, thoroughly test the migration and hit a Homerun.

Let’s break down each of the steps.

1. Set the deadline for the data migration project

Select the date when you want to start the migration. The best variant is to find a quiet time when the stream of the customers’ requests is the least intense, because the process may take up from several hours to several days, depending on the volume of your data. Why is it important? Chances are that after the migration you’ll need to re-key some tickets that were funneled in the old system during the migration.

Then, select the date when your team should get started with Freshdesk. This will help you map out the milestones you have to encounter as well as to choose the final date of the transition. Determine when it’s time you completely have the data imported, your Desk account closed and when you will finally start using your Freshdesk.

2. Share your responsibility for the migration as a whole

The next step is to determine a stakeholder to pass control over the process. It could be someone from your internal team, for sure. This way you can make sure everything flows in its order. But, not every IT team have enough expertise to complete fast and quality data migration.

Using a safe third-party service is always a better idea. A great example of such a service is Help Desk Migration. We can not only move your data (even with some customization requirements) to Freshdesk but also help with any advice regarding the process. The greatest part is that you can completely pass on the migration process to us. Just let us do this job for you, saving you precious time.

3. Make sure that support agents are ready

The support team is obviously an indispensable part of the customer service which will be affected by migration in the first place. So you need to get them prepared for the switch and reduce the inconvenience.

Here are some of the things that you can do to help your team handle the change:

Educate responsible employees about the new software.

Give all the employees enough time to get used to Freshdesk.

Provide adequate training.

Encouraging team members to participate in the change and providing all the necessary education will help to smooth out all the inconveniences.

3. Look through the settings

Desk and Freshdesk are different in the way they simplify agent workflow. Pay attention to the automation that you’ve been using in Desk.com and compare them with the alternatives which Freshdesk offer. Regardless of the way you choose to move the data, these and other settings need to be transferred manually.

Plan ahead the usage and organization of all the macros and automation. It significantly saves time when you go live with Freshdesk.

4. Go through the historical records to transition vital data

The first thing you should do is decide whether you need all of the data in Freshdesk or not. Many companies keep their old tickets because they contain information included in roadmaps, product development, etc. Besides, if a customer raises a new ticket, it’s great to have their interaction history at sight. But you could receive an email from the ad campaign or a request sent to the support team by mistake. So, it’s better to go through your old system and see what needs to stay and what can be left behind.

Here are some practices for doing this the best way:

Analyze the data and classify it into important, critical, and insignificant for your business. Thus, it will be easier for you to determine which part of customer data you can “cleanse” or, in other words, just delete.

Then, examine your data on the parameters of correctness, completeness, and uniqueness. Search through every record and improve any anomalies if needed.

Then, compare the data structure of the source and target systems. There’s more to the difference between help desks than the names of objects. Let’s say that the help desk you want to migrate from has departments. And your new help desk does not have this object. Preparing for the migration, you have to figure out the help desk structure to bypass such limitations to keep the integrity of your data.

5. Run multiple tests and iron out any issues (if they occur)

Now, when everything is planned and ready, what to do next? It’s always better to check twice and cut once. Running a couple of trial migrations, you can make sure everything goes according to your plan. Here are the reasons why demo migration is highly recommended:

You can view how your current records will look in Freshdesk to avoid any “surprises”.

In case the data structure is different from the original one or you can’t find some part of records at all, it will be the best time to fix this. Carefully check all tickets and their fields, until you are completely sure.

If you reveal any issues, you won’t have to worry about them after the Full Migration is complete as they will be dealt with during the trial.

Have everything tested? Great job! Get started with your full data migration as soon as possible.

To Conclude

Migration from one help desk to another may be a challenging experience, especially when done for the first time. There is a lot of work to cope with throughout the whole process: from deciding on the future platform to checking the final results. However, if you create and follow your help desk migration plan step by step, you can make your help desk migration a great experience with more than satisfactory results.

Help Desk Migration is an amazing service that can deal with your data migration from Desk.com to Freshdesk easily!